A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always count on the support of Paul.

The first requirement of a statesman is that he be dull.

There is no method by which men can be both free and equal.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern them.

Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: they last while they last.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

Politics is the art of the possible.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal.

You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

People revere the Constitution yet know so little about it—and that goes for some of my fellow senators.

I’m president of the United States, and I’m not going to eat any more broccoli!